If I remember my business law, in these kind of cases it will come down to whether the railroad reasonably attempted to prevent such fires from happening, whether a reasonable man could decide they bore fault for it (and again, this is what I recall). In theory they could (again based on what I remember of business law) argue the railroad is responsible under the idea of vicarious liability (basically if an activity is so dangerous that no matter how many precautions you take, it doesn't matter, you are found to be fully liable..one case I remember, radiation machine used in cancer treatment had a bug in the software controlling it that ended up basically killing a patient, was ruled under vicarious liability). Again based on my recall from courses, they might assign a certain percentage of the blame on the railroad, along with other contributing factors.For example, if the fire happened at a time when there was a particularly severe drought, versus what it would be normally, and it could be shown that the fire likely would not have happened or been a lot less severe, that could mitigate penalties. They could also find in this example hypothetically, that the state was partially at fault, that if in fact there was a severe drought, they should have curtailed operations of anything that had the potential to spark a fire, or at the least issued alerts (and obviously I don't know the conditiions at the time, this is a pure hypothetical).
I can only hope that whatever comes out of this, it doesn't shut down the D and S, or worse, act as a catalyst for other tourist/steam railroads to be shut down. My hope is in the end that the railroad took what precautions it could and it was simply an unfortunate accident, and that there ends up some sort of settlement that allows both sides to walk away intact. Personally (and that is all it is), unless the railroad was grossly negligent, where it could be shown that its efforts were sub standard to try and prevent accidental fires, if they can try and nail them for full liability (and yes, I realize the law often says things like "the property owner only needs to show their loss and that the fire originated in such a fashion", but I am pretty certain that codicil to the law in terms of outcomes of lawsuits is still bound by whether the actions of the railroad to prevent fire were found to be non negligent.").
One note, this isn't greedy lawyers out to make a quick buck off a company, this is the federal government suing for the cost of putting out what became a major fire, the lawyers working on this (unless the feds are using private attorneys under contract, rather than staff attorneys) are not gonna get rich from this, they don't get a percent of the settlement directly, they are paid to handle the case. For better or worse, the government spent a lot of money and time putting out the fire, people risked their lives fighting it, and whether I think they should have filed suit or not, it is a reasonable action to try and get back their cost of fighting the fire. Doesn't mean it is fair, either, how many major fires turn out to be either someone stupidly leaving a campfire unattended, or worse arson for fun? Do they go after the operator of a campground where the person accidentally started a fire? Odds are, they don't, in part because they likely wouldn't collect much.
